Printroom.com like capabilities?

[sdotbrucato]

I'm putting together a website for a friend who happens to be a photographer. I was going to throw this all together in WordPress and be done with it, as I do with most friends that want me to do a website for them. But.. she just informed me that she'd like be able to have a customer portal of sorts, where clients can login and see their sessions and purchase prints from that.

This is out of my league as a "designer" but I figure there has to be some sort of web app that does this, or something close to it, which is why I come seeking the knowledge and insight of the [H] Webmasters and coders =)

Thanks
-Steven

 

[flyingturtle]

Hmm...I'm kind of curious about this too. I just had a good photographer friend ask me about improving his site, as he does a lot of weddings.

I could code what you suggested from scratch, but I too was wondering if there was some pre-built or existing CMS (content management system) that might do something similar. Why invent the wheel if someone else has already one it, preferably an open-source "wheel". =)

The first idea that popped into my head was to explore Drupal, the popular open-source CMS, as that has a ton of plugins made from the community. I've deployed Drupal sites for portals and for e-commerce websites. Drupal with the Ubercart plugin could be used for the e-commerce section so that would work for selling your friend's prints. Drupal has a membership system so you can create and add users so you would be able to create specific pages and sections only for a certain user and add your photographer pictures.

As for photo browsing, I've used slideshow pro for some of my photographer and artist clients, but they just wanted something nice to show their artwork and photos. It has an optional backend feature, SlideShowPro Director, to allow for easy uploading and updating photos to website, which is pretty nice.

If somehow Slideshow pro could be integrated with Drupal, then that would be cool. Probably could be done easily. Just create a new slideshow gallery for each user, and show it via a user specific page in Drupal that can only be seen by that user. Although there would be have to be a way of marking pictures in Slideshow, so they can selected for purchase as prints. Slideshow Pro has a pretty nice API, but that would mean some programming skills so probably out of your scope.

Drupal does have photogallery plugins so that might be easier to hack rather than delving into ActionScript if hacking SlideShow Pro.

Yeah, I think the matter of marking/selecting photos will be a stumbling block for the non-coder, unless there is a pre-built application that can do that, or plugin for Drupal or similar CMS, like Joomla, or Wordpress, PHPNuke, DotNetNuke, etc.

Anyway, I'd look into the CMSs I mentioned above, check out the plugins for it and see if anyone has modified it to something you want.

I might do some investigating myself.

 

[sdotbrucato]

Hmm...I'm kind of curious about this too. I just had a good photographer friend ask me about improving his site, as he does a lot of weddings.

I could code what you suggested from scratch, but I too was wondering if there was some pre-built or existing CMS (content management system) that might do something similar. Why invent the wheel if someone else has already one it, preferably an open-source "wheel". =)

The first idea that popped into my head was to explore Drupal, the popular open-source CMS, as that has a ton of plugins made from the community. I've deployed Drupal sites for portals and for e-commerce websites. Drupal with the Ubercart plugin could be used for the e-commerce section so that would work for selling your friend's prints. Drupal has a membership system so you can create and add users so you would be able to create specific pages and sections only for a certain user and add your photographer pictures.

As for photo browsing, I've used slideshow pro for some of my photographer and artist clients, but they just wanted something nice to show their artwork and photos. It has an optional backend feature, SlideShowPro Director, to allow for easy uploading and updating photos to website, which is pretty nice.

If somehow Slideshow pro could be integrated with Drupal, then that would be cool. Probably could be done easily. Just create a new slideshow gallery for each user, and show it via a user specific page in Drupal that can only be seen by that user. Although there would be have to be a way of marking pictures in Slideshow, so they can selected for purchase as prints. Slideshow Pro has a pretty nice API, but that would mean some programming skills so probably out of your scope.

Drupal does have photogallery plugins so that might be easier to hack rather than delving into ActionScript if hacking SlideShow Pro.

Yeah, I think the matter of marking/selecting photos will be a stumbling block for the non-coder, unless there is a pre-built application that can do that, or plugin for Drupal or similar CMS, like Joomla, or Wordpress, PHPNuke, DotNetNuke, etc.

Anyway, I'd look into the CMSs I mentioned above, check out the plugins for it and see if anyone has modified it to something you want.

I might do some investigating myself.

I'll keep looking if you will, let me know if you come across anything. I thought about hacking a bunch of different plugins but Im hoping to find an out of the box fix to this problem. =)